Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Who is getting the rest of the undergrad science degrees if Asians, Blacks, and Whites only account for 74% of them?

the numbers are from this source: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/digest/field-of-degree-m...

it distinguishes between white (59.3), Asian (10.8), Black or African American (3.9), Hispanic or Latino (10.4), American Indian or Alaska Native (0.3) Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (0.1) and Temporary visa holder (9.3) for Engineering

Edit: and More than one race, unknown, or other (5.9), adds up to 100

Possibly Native Americans/First Peoples, Pacific Islanders, or individuals who self-identify by ethnicity rather than race on these types of reports.

Also people of Indian descent, for whom it can sometimes be pretty annoying to get dumped into the 'Asian' bucket.

That was my first thought. Probably (maybe wrong, just IME) most 'people from the Western portion of continental Asia' don't see themselves (I suppose we say 'self-identify' now) as 'Asian'.

Similarly to we Britons speaking of 'Europe' and particularly 'Europeans' with the 'continental' implied - and even that phrase not really making sense, not meaning the same as 'mainland'!

Doesn't America have a great deal of mixed-race people (like their prior President)? Or is that not usually treated as a separate category there?

Perhaps some come from the 2nd Largest demographic group, Latinx, (about 16% of the population). As another commenter said, that leaves about 9% who don’t fall into these major groups.

On modern surveys of this sort (for example, the US Census), 'of Hispanic descent' is usually a separate question entirely from the 'White / Black / Asian / etc' one, in a clumsy attempt to capture the overlap of mixed-ethnicity groups.

That would support the hypothesis, if latinx people check ‘other’ and ‘of Hispanic descent’.

Many modern forms just say ‘check any that apply’, so you can check both white and Asian, for example.

I think it's because of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is clearly Latin-American, but many Puertoricans would identify as Black as well, and these two are independent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com